Victor/Vittorio

NINO RICCI was born in 1959 in Leamington, Ontario, and holds dual Canadian and Italian citizenship. His first novel, "The Book of Saints," won Canada's Governor General's Award and a host of other honors, and it was easy to see why, for "The Book of Saints" was a brilliant, brooding, beautifully written, hard-edged rendering of the Italian Apennine village of Valle del Sole and the clannish, fiercely pious, omen-fearing families who inhabit it.

In that book, Mario Innocente headed to the fantasized "Sun Parlor" of Canada to find farm work, abandoning his wife, Cristina, and his bitterly lonely 7-year-old son, Vittorio. The wide-eyed boy witnessed his mother's affair with another man and felt the burden of his village's shunning and persecution when she was found to be pregnant. At the book's conclusion, his mother died in childbirth, and Vittorio and the baby girl were forced to go to Canada.

"In a Glass House" is the melancholy sequel to "The Book of Saints" and the bridge novel in Mr. Ricci's projected trilogy, shifting Vittorio and his infant half sister from the familiar world of the Apennine Mountains to his father's greenhouses and 30-acre farm on the shores of Lake Erie.

Everything is bewildering to the boy: the English language, the flatness of the geography, the houses set off from one another "as if in enmity," the funereal faces of the paesani who visit the farmhouse, even his seething and sullen father, who seems "merely a kind of element I had to move through, my body tensing against him like a single hard muscle when he was near, taking in only his animal scent and then the shape he cut like black space in a landscape."

Mario has blotted the illegitimate baby girl from his mind, failing even to name her, "seeming to see in her place only an irrelevant shadow or blur." But then his brash and funny sister, Teresa, arrives from Italy and wholly changes the household, lightening its gloom, challenging her brother and naming the girl Margherita, for "the saint all the mothers pray to when they're going to have a baby."

Vittorio first goes to school as a skinny, pining, ill-dressed immigrant, humiliated by being put back two years, to the first grade, because of his lack of English, and perpetually fearful of being seen by others as stupid and strange. But his sister, Rita, as she soon calls herself, finds a kind of normality there, and through a friendship with a girl named Elena Amherst fits herself so thoroughly into the foreign world around her that she hardly seems part of the family. Weekend sleepovers gradually lead to longer stays away from home, and by hinting that her schoolyard bruises were in fact inflicted by her hot-tempered father, Rita blithely fakes her way into a full adoption by the Amhersts.

Even his father seems assimilated into Canadian life by the time Vittorio, or Victor, finishes high school. Elected president of the local Italian club, Mario has formed a partnership with his brother, Umberto, built new greenhouses and planted them with tomatoes, figs, grapevines and orange trees, and become "the one whom people came to now, whom families passed by to greet before supper, whom the men, weighty with confidences, sidled up to at the bar."

But his son is still full of loneliness and self-loathing, ever the outsider. Even at a university in Toronto, Victor senses that he somehow "couldn't strike the right tone with people, felt I'd lost myself, could only impersonate, had to make up instant by instant who it might be acceptable for me to be."

Huddled on a couch in a counseling center, he talks about his poisoned childhood but feels "a lapse in my memory like a hole in it. There were the obvious things, that my mother had had an affair, that she'd died in childbirth; but then beyond that I could hardly so much as call up an image of her, could remember only flickering details like the lingering fragments of a dream. . . . I had the sense for an instant that I'd mistakenly thought of as real some story I'd only imagined."

Redemption does follow loss in this book, and the ending is cautiously optimistic, despite a further tragedy that it would not be fair to report. "In a Glass House" is a haunting, lyrical, intelligent coming-of-age novel that turns the triumphant, welcoming, "you can do anything in America" myth on its head. The misery and joylessness of the story can seem self-pitying at times, but the acuity of its observations, the eloquence of its prose and the hard-earned wisdom of its final pages make it a genuine achievement.